I could tell that you had smoked a cigarette before I saw you because your
shirt smelled like smoke and your lips tasted like lung cancer.       (I like to
                            pretend that it doesn’t really bother me I am a moth flying
                                                                ­                                     into your flame.)

Your eyes are green like everything that burns, but your hands are strong
like those who fight fires without more fire.  Sometimes I trick myself into
thinking that I can smell the backyard smoke of my father’s cigarettes,
                                              cigars,­ marijuana, radiating off of you.

Do you remember that time when you told me that “everyone sins?”  I do
not think that you took into account the amount of which we all sin.  (All
sinners are equal, but some are more equal than others.)  ((fire will always
    destroy moths. You are burning my wings with your magnifying glass))

I think I am drowning in the gene pool.  I think I’ve broken the bones of
three different people.  I am terrified my dream catcher will stop working    
                 and years worth of nightmares will catch up with me.  Light my
          nightmares on fire with your lighter.  Turn my everything to smoke.

I spent my entire last year breaking wishbones and hiding them underneath my mattress for luck.  I spent my entire last week getting
splattered with the blood of lambs that I’ve slaughtered in your name, in
                                                   the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  
                      We are lighting moths on fire and watching their wings burn.

There is a chrysalis I am building.  I am not looking for change, I am looking
for the darkness and safety it will provide.  When I hatch, listen to my wings
flutter.  Wait for me to land and then squash me with your cigarette ****.  
Smoke me out of your house.  If you love me,           you will set all the bad
                                                             ­                              parts of me        on fire.

GEMINI:
The creases on your palms are
valleys full of quicksand; your hands
have sunken through my skin and
into my bones.  You opened your fists in
mid-autumn and by mid-winter, our heart lines,
our lifelines, had fused.  Dear Pollux, sometimes
I wonder how you could not know that

on those cold February nights, it is not
puffs of air that escape your Cupid’s bow, but rather
wisps of fetal star, swirling and curling up and up
into new constellations—ones depicting
Cleopatra and Antony
                                           Paris and Helen
                                                                              you and I.

The looking glass in my mother’s washroom no longer
displays emerald orbs; they have been melted down
from a solid to a liquid to a stacking, twirling vapor
that I can no longer see, nor feel.  But the thing about you,
Dear Pollux, is that somehow, though it is beyond me how,
you have captured her scalloping memory and turned
everything to smoky quartz—
you reflect the placidity I hope she found.

The sinkhole in my abdomen that mother dearest created has
been gorged with your quicksand, and I am gluttonous for you.  There’s
a part of me that thinks you to be the eighth wonder of the world
with your wide eyes and your slight dimples and your
ability to generate earthquakes in my bones with a
snap of your fingers.  But Pollux, sweetheart, there’s a nagging
suspicion I have that deems you to be the eighth deadly sin—
         your lips branding my neck;
         your hands burrowing through the flesh of my hips;
         the pearls you create from the grains of sand I carry.
I oftentimes wonder how you figured out the secret of
melting my amethyst crested core.

Your horoscope will tell you that you are wishy washy, but
I will tell you that you are dynamic and paramount.  You
will be told that today “you must wrestle your past before
communicating with your future,” and I shall roll my eyes and
tell you that the only thing you must wrestle is my affection.
Your fate is not in the stars, Pollux, darling;
your fate has nothing to do with the Year of the Pig or
the Gemini constellation that is so ruled by Mercury—
the fortune tellers we made in elementary school were
accurate representations of coincidence.

You will find your destiny in
the palms of your hands and I will
find my destiny within you.

It’s a large cavern.  A gaping hole—
                                                                A black hole.  
Slow and fast.        Pain and numb.        Yin and yang.
The blackened lung.        The bust vessel.        The mutated cells.
                     It’s everything and nothing at once.

                                                    What is the condition of my heart?
I couldn't begin to tell you.
It’s hope and
                    it’s anger and
                                           it’s frustration and
                                                                ­           it’s a corked bottle on high heat.

Lush leaves.  Turquoise lagoon.  Iron sky.  
Everything looks like it's
                                               filmed through a blue filter, Twilight style—
                                                         this is what my heart looks like.  

Grey like brain.  Serosanguineous like cerebrospinal fluid
collecting from a shunt to a bag from a cracked open skull.  
Purple and green and yellow like bruises on
                      hands that don't have enough platelets to heal.  
Teal like an N95 mask.  Lilac like a casket spray.  
Soft pink like the padding of a wood overcoat.  
Grey.                        Grey.                   ­     Grey. 

This is what you will find if you crack my chest,
                                          spread my diaphragm,
                                                   my sternum,
                                               shuffle my lungs.
Sounds like asystole on the monitors, but still
           somehow producing electrical currents.  

The condition of my heart is cavernous.  
A sunset on the east coast; a sunrise on the west.  
                                                         ­                                Bittersweet.

There’s a crystal ball that sits on my dresser
that I never fully learned how to use.  There’s
a pack of Tarot cards that reside beneath my
pillow that I use to play solitaire with.  I
have never known what it means to
“Be like Jesus.”

I find the numbers
              13        and        18
to be rather unlucky, which is probably why
I branded one onto me externally and the
other internally.  I wonder if my grandmother
now knows the secrets of the world, if my
battle-eyed grandfather knows the
key to redemption.  I wonder if
my sister ever learned how to control
the talking skulls in her closet.

I wonder what my Pastor would say about
my fear of Purgatory.

Three days
three weeks
three years
five years later and I am still waiting for
                                                                ­              Absolution.

I am not very good at saying no to people,
                              or at being firm and direct with my patients at work.  
           I am soft and mandible.  
           I tend to let people take advantage of me.  

My physical therapist says the people with the most problems
with their hips and backs are
                                                        the ones that can          
                                                        hardly bend at all or
                                                                                                 that can
                                       bend              too             much.

I am too flexible.  
                              So much so that it is hurting me.  
                                    I fold and I fold and I fold
                                               in on myself like origami and
                                      I let people do whatever they want.  
I can't remember if I've always been this way or not.  

Maybe it depends on how you look at it:  
The woman in the casket could either be sleeping or dead.  She could either be a stranger or my mother.  This could either be the bright, multi-color, kaleidoscopic shapes I see when I rub my eyes a bit too hard for a bit too long, or it could be the dull, grey morgue her body was wheeled down to after they tied the tag around her toe and zipped her into a white bag.  This could either hurt a lot or a little.  It depends on how much you let in.  How willing you are to bend to the emotional blow.  I could either stop writing about this or keep going, but it's been, what, nine years now, and I haven't been able to stop yet—
only able to bend and
                                          bend
                 ­                                      and
                                                                    bend
                                                                                    and

The memory of your battered work boots,
tipped on their sides and haphazardly strewn about
the back hallway, my mother
asking you to put them away.

To the love song playing on the radio,
you recalled that the first time you
heard it, you were standing in Times Square
and you immediately thought of my mother.  (I
wonder if you still think of her.)  You
picked up a can of Miller.  You took a swig.

My sister, just a few months old and laying in
her bassinet, plucked from the comfort and placed
into her carrier.  You toted her around with you,
took her to meet the crowd in the beer garden.
You took two sips.

On the weekends, you would lounge on the couch with
race cars in your eyes.  Your thoughts were far
away from little girls playing dress up and
little girls toying with dolls.  Your thoughts were on
the equipment from work that you had
begun hoarding.  You took three gulps.

My weekends, spent with my grandparents, felt
like mini vacations.  Your cool distance and rotten
behavior towards my mother felt like arms outstretched,
keeping me away, forcing me away.  Childhood like a peach
out in the sun for too long, overripe and decaying,
you threw it in the trash and I helped.  

The sour taste in my mouth is leftover childhood
ignorance, the kick in my gut when I think about you
is leftover betrayal—I will not mourn a traditional
childhood, I will mourn your lack of apathy.  You will
never know remorse.  

The phone will ring, and I will not answer.  You will
leave messages, and I will delete them.  We are
on two different planes now,
                                                      Daddy.

I am a kaleidoscope—shapelessly shifting, and
dominated by colors that I cannot change
without some sort of grandiose outside force
granting me a helping hand.  I might as well be water.

But my reflection insists on creating dissonance.  She
and I, although we look the same, do not coincide
as neatly as
           yin and yang
           Adam and Eve
           my hand in his.                       Perhaps because
thoughts and feelings generally
do not mix like paint.

Human beings are full of hypocrisies; I am merely
one of seven billion.  My doppelganger knows that

I will never be harmonious, and I am but an echo
of Sisyphus, yet still I wonder if she also knows how
sanctimonious I can be at even the best of times; how
wolfish my attitude can turn; how
downright wicked I can become.
                                                        (Perhaps she is overlooking it.)

Oftentimes, I find myself wondering if those ugly,
impulse actions I grudgingly stomach are really my
own choices, or if they are hers.  I am the analytical
one of us, and she, the fervent, the hot-blooded prima donna;
I think of how easily I lay down my neck to her will, how often I
throw my frontal lobe at her, belly up,
as if to say,             “this is my
                                              white flag.”
I allow my duplicate’s hands to twist and turn my paths.

She makes me self-conscious of the
           coffee splotch birthmark on my shin,
           my flummoxed feet that flounder about;
           the mausoleum I keep buried
six-feet-under in my backyard.  Her sentiment
bleeds into me and permanently dyes my bones red
like the red meat I am; she tries to coalesce us.  
                                                        Perhaps it’s idiosyncratic of me to
rip myself in two, but being made of water
makes it hard for oil to blend into place; it makes it
hard for logic to have any room for a
seemingly clairvoyant heart, though

sometimes I wonder if my sophist thoughts could
possibly have any consideration for my twin’s
sibylline yet affectionate disposition.  I
wonder what the
           secret is to being whole, what the
           secret is to ending civil wars, and what the
           secret is to placidity—
I wonder why all my answers are kept under lock and key.

The internal bloodshed within myself might not
be as abnormal as I think it to be, but if it’s not me who
I see when I look into the mirror,
what is it that others see?

You broke a wishbone with my father nine months before
my birth and I am the outcome of the small trophy you
held onto when you lost to his larger luck line.  Sometimes
I wish that you didn’t make such a
sacrificial lamb of yourself.  Sometimes
I wish that I could dig my fingers into my skin
and rip out every single vein that looks
too much like pisces fish, like amethyst bracelets,
                      like rotting cadavers.

Mother, I don’t think that either of us have ever been
too good at doing what is expected of us.

You wild horse, you wild heart, you wild storm—
there is a lighthouse somewhere north
from here that overlooks the lake, and I can’t help
but marvel at the fact that you get to be the
light that calls us home when I can still see you
sitting in your locked car until the garage door closed.  

(A hummingbird’s heart can pulsate
up to 1,260 beats per minute and now, I think,
so can yours.)  Your ribs
were not enough to hold your
tick,
           tick,
                      ticking clock
in one place.  Mother, your teeth were not
strong enough to hold your words inside—from you,
I have learned resistance in the witching hour;
from you, I was taught how to build a
backbone in the hour of the wolf.

You cut off a rabbit’s foot the day I was born,
but that foot was yours all along.  I am
walking around, trying to find the rabbit, trying to
give it back, but I fear that I am
falling down a hole my father dug with his bare,
          blood            stained            hands
years and years before my sister was born.  
Sometimes I wish that you didn’t
turn my childhood into an enigma.  Sometimes
I wish that I could dig my nails into
every slipping memory, every unfinished story,
                      every last word,
and rid myself of the doppelgänger I found
in the looking glass of your bedroom.

There is a secret to being holy, I hear, but
I don’t think Jesus will share it with me.  I stepped
on your grave five years ago now and
I don’t think you have forgiven me since.

Mother, I have never been too skilled at
                saying, “goodbye.”

the edges of his cupid’s bow lips quirked
up with the rising sun and I thought that perhaps
I had been shot by one of his arrows—
young love, young cherub,
how reckless we are.

I watched a man die from a distance the other night at work.  
He was a patient on my unit,
                                                    a BOP, a bedded outpatient.  
Came in for a routine procedure, it ran long, so they
stuck him in a bed overnight for observation and
discharged him the next afternoon.  

Came back three days later.  
Valve exploded in his chest.  
Transferred to CVICU.  
Coded twice.  

The first code was cancelled almost immediately.  
False alarm.  Critical condition, but not a code.  
The second code they called dragged on and on and on.  

I know this because someone pulled him up on the telemetry monitor by our nurse’s station, and we watched him flatline, watched him asystole, watched his heart at zero and zero and zero.  Watched them bag him, give manual respirations.  Watched the forced waves on his flat rhythm from each compression.  Every palm to sternum.  Every electric shock caused a wave and then fell flat.  Zero.  Zero.  Zero.  Absolute zero.  Like in space or whatever.  So cold.  No life, no movement.  Zero, just zero.  Flatline.  Asystole.  No life possible, no life attainable.  
I watched him die from a distance.  From two floors above on a computer monitor.  Secondhand death.

They stopped compressing,
                                                    stopped bagging,
                                                                                   and he stopped existing.  
Became stagnant, static.  No longer
held in the balance, in the limbo,
in the purgatory between life and death.  
                                                        ­                    He crossed over and
                                                             ­             stayed at absolute zero.  

I never met him, just knew of him, so
                                                              wh­at does that mean for me?  
                                                           ­   What am I supposed to do with
           the knowledge that many of the patients I come in contact with
                          die sometimes very soon after I meet them?  

Most things I touch die.  Plants, fish, hamsters, my mother.  
We can’t spare everyone, that’s stupid.  There is
a natural order to things.  Darwinism.  Survival of the fittest.  
                                        All that *******.  

When my mother landed herself in the ICU, we knew
                                                   where she wanted her money to go, but
                not what we were supposed to do with all this ******* grief.  
                Not what to do with her body.  
                Not if we should keep her on life support to
                                                                ­                  drag out the suffering.  
She gave no directions on how to live without a mother.  

(But how do you direct something like that?
An idea so big, so lofty that directions will always fall short.)

The grief cycle will
                                     always fall short.  
Most days I don’t think acceptance is truly possible.  

Some days I’m there, and others I’m not.  
                                                          ­          It’s not linear, it’s not stagnant.  
                                                     ­                       It’s not absolute zero.  
It moves back and forth and
                                               becomes the snake eating its own tail.  
                                                         ­           Ouroboros.  

Where do you go from here?  How do you truly move on?  

I’m falling through a gas giant.  Nothing keeps hold here,
                                                         nothing keeps score (but the body).  

It’s 5:27 in the morning and I’m thinking
                                                 about that man that flatlined again.
Zero on the telemetry monitors, no heart rhythm, asystole. Spike for compression.  Nothing, nothing, nothing.  The body gets cold when there is no more blood pumping, no more heartbeat, no more brain waves; nothing to keep it warm.  Blood slowly slinks down to the lowest bend.  Becomes a bruise on the skin.  Absolute zero is the coldest theoretical temperature. No movement possible.  So cold, atoms cannot move.  Electrons cannot hum.  
                                                        The body becomes this. No life possible.

It’s not what it looks like.  It’s never what it looks like. 
                                               It’s all wrong
                                                                ­          somewhere.  

Out in the Ukrainian backwoods, Chernobyl looks
like a ghost town some thirty years later.  Intact but
abandoned, vacant—hemorrhaged of humanity.  Like in mass
everyone left the city to buy some milk and never returned.  
Life in the standstill.  Lights left on now burnt out.  Meat
thawing on the counter now mold on the counter.  Laundry
half folded on the bed.  The bath water
ran and ran and ran until the well dried up.  

You wouldn’t know that the soil and
                                                                    the cats and
                                                  the dogs  
                were radioactive
unless you held a meter against it to measure the roentgen.

The hermit crab soft underneath its hard shell.
The mold growing around the core of the shining red apple.  
The asbestos hiding in the insulation.  
The lead in the paint on the crib.  

Sometimes, the things that look the most fine can **** you.

slip me on like a sweater
I am your second skin
            let me protect you